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The word cancer is derived from Hippocrates himself, who referred to malignant tumors as karkinos due to how "the veins stretched on all sides as the animal the crab has its feet, whence it derives its name". It's just that when the life expectancy is 30 then people generally die from something else first, and when the tumor isn't externally visible it's hard to diagnose. This is the sort of thing a Renaissance doctor would've successfully diagnosed as cancer:  Lung cancer, probably not so much.
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Feb 11, 2017 20:47
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 11:46 |
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Yeah, I'm not saying that everyone keeled over at 30 and therefore no cancer; the mean age of death was lower and the variance higher. Point is the modern cancer "epidemic" isn't caused by cancer being more aggressive nowadays, or even because we encounter or consume significantly more carcinogens. It's there because the combination of not generally starving and modern medicine allows humans to survive a bunch of things that would have killed us 200 years ago. We keep on surviving until we hit one of the comparably fewer problems medicine still can't do much about. Cancer is one of those and so a much larger percentage of the population end up dying from it. Personally I was hospitalized for appendicitis, bronchitis, peritonitis and pneumonia in my 20s. None of them killed me, thanks to the magic of drugs and really sharp knives, and as a result I still have a pretty good odds of experiencing cancer. In medieval Al-Andalus, I would have almost certainly snuffed it from any one of them (apparently even more likely: I would have been magically cured by castration, then died in a hunting accident or in a latrine explosion plotted by my wife).
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Feb 12, 2017 04:19
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Snipee posted:Do we have any examples of captured Popes being executed in OTL? The always helpful wikipedia has a list of popes who died violently, quite a few of them qualify because the middle ages were pretty batshit. The guy who held the Cadaver Synod is one.
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Mar 29, 2017 06:21
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